Word: actes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Amid outcries about freedom, characters die as if it were the last act of Hamlet; amid tirades against power, slave girls uncover and Caligula runs wild. If there is a unifying note in all this it is that the characters, whether male or female, slave or free, vile or virtuous, slain or spared, are orators one and all. So much oratory has its touches of eloquence, so much theatricalism its flashes of theater. But the play as a whole is lumberingly lurid, and Alvin Epstein's Claudius offers some adroit stammering that is more effective than anyone else...
...less sexy idea whirling, brings on a character every 46 seconds, drops out a gag every 19, makes a hideaway of the men's room and a rumpus room of the office. Aspiring to pandemonium, the authors never fail of noise; left creatively penniless at the second-act curtain, they spend the third act kiting checks...
...curtain hog, she has been known to refuse to take a solo curtain call after the third act of Manon Lescaut because "it is the tenor's act." Her patience with her fans is apparently limitless: she will sit hour after hour backstage after exhausting performances, dutifully signing autographs ("Poor things," she murmurs, "poor things"). She still regards public figures outside opera with the awe of a country girl on her first trip to the city. Several years ago she heard about the "Night in Monte Carlo" ball at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria, at which Prince Rainier...
...Carabiniere. Until she died last winter, Renata Tebaldi's mother accompanied her on all her tours, acted so effectively as a backstage buffer for her daughter that fellow singers affectionately nicknamed her "The Carabiniere." She handled Renata's mail (weeding out the occasional poison-pen letters from over-zealous Callas fans), took care of her clothes and costumes, stationed herself in the wings to minister to Renata with a Thermos jug of warm tea and an emergency flask of brandy when she came offstage. She was quick to resent any affronts to her daughter. Backstage lore...
...Could It Be? In the outcry following this journalistic coup, Galeazzi-Lisi first defended his act ("I waited until my patient was dead"), then denied that he had received "un soldo" for his pains, then resigned his post. The College of Cardinals banned him from the Vatican. As the storm of censure mounted, the greatest cry was appropriately against the money-hungry doctor rather than the story-hungry press. Milan's daily Il Giorno (circ. 150,000), coming to the astonished realization that the Pope's chief physician was not a tried clinician, asked what was, perhaps...